This has been on my mind a lot lately, and that is why we as humans place such a high value on duality. As I was working through different religions and philosophies, and questioning their assumptions, I realized that duality is a pretty common concept.

My first thought was that it might be because of language. I am a native English speaker and our language is rife with this. However, as I looked at other languages it was quickly apparent that they suffered the same bias.

Humans have a number of psychological biases across cultures and languages, for example our number system is a base 10, which is theorized to come from the number of fingers. If we were born with 8 fingers, we would most likely use a base 8 systems.

Peter Carroll brings this up in Octavo, but as of yet has not posited or suggested why humans are focused on duality.

My current working theory is that we see so much duality in nature, and humans have an amazing ability to find patterns and project/guess future actions, that we take this pattern as a fundamental building block of the universe and project it into all abstract thinking.

I would love to know if you have thought about this, and came to different conclusions. I think I would like to adopt a belief system that does not rely on duality, but hell if I can find one or truly understand where this requirement is coming from.

- Vap0rWar3To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings

I think it's a psychological trait that we developed during pre civilization to aide in our survival as a species.

I'm a competitive fighting game player and have read about a million articles on reducing your mental stack. The gist of it is, the more things you are actively trying to watch out for, the slower your reaction time is. You don't want to think about the literal hundreds of things your opponent might do and prepare for each one or you will freeze. You break it down into the smallest subset you can to react quickly. "If he walks forward I'll fireball. If he jumps I'll Dragon punch." Same thing applies in martial arts.

So ancient man would have taken too long to react to a threat and died if he stood there playing out the infinite spectrum of things that might happen. He had to reduce his mental stack to react quickly.

Fight or flight
Friend or foe
Can I eat this or can it eat me
Danger or safe

It still occasionally comes in handy in modern times, but at least in first world countries the average person is not often in danger. So more often than not this works against us rather than for us, causing us to oversimplify nuanced situations.

duality is important but so is observing it subjectively. Without options nothing exist so we have tons of options. The idea is to, how I understand it, separate your mind to an outside observer. Be informed from both sides of the argument. Make a judgment call best you can. That's the immediate trinity. The pattern keeps repeating so mastering the most local and physical ones make progress easy. Get your shit together and get in shape. Don't ignore your mind so allocate time wisely. Just repeat this process on each plane. If you get hung up, try later. Its good to take little chops now and again. Avoid getting stuck on a side but respect the importance of having a side to choose.

The state of enlightenment is the state of non duality. Maybe zen is what you are looking for, it's more of a state of mind than a belief system.

“Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality.
Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore.
The two are rarely compatible.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic

So follow on to this, I met with a professor who wrote his thesis on the duality of human languages. Turns out its down in the roots of all known languages. Binary to our bones. Im thinking that the earliest factor was probably human gender. That seems like the most immediate distinction, on which all other dualities would follow.

As for my own personal attempts, I have developed a Trinary system, where there is order, chaos, and entropy. Chaos in my mind is more like the potential of order or if we went in the direction of quantum states, then it would be a super-position, having the attributes of all possibles until defined.

That form of chaos more closely links to kaos, as well as how it was interpreted by the ancient greeks.

- Vap0rWar3To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings

Also I wanted to add that duality is established with children as a necessity. I can credit Alan Watts for this and as a father validate it. When a human is born the don't know they are not all of existence. Or they are born knowing what we struggle to re-learn. At first we validate this belief. The parents are frenzied to meet the needs of the God. Of course children struggle with boundaries. They will spend the majority of life being told what is not them. We initiate them into duality. Don't play with that gun, don't drink that bleach, get daddy a beer, wipe your own ass. We establish the "them" and "not them" ASAP, out of love and responsibility. We all hate that kid that throws a tantrum when they don't get what they want and honestly we spend a lot of time trying to realize we don't need it, it was ours all along.

Kaos is the greek term for primordial essence. Also spelled "khaos", "χάος", and some others.

KHAOS (Chaos) was the first of the primordial gods (protogenoi) to emerge at the dawn of creation. She was followed in quick succession by Gaia (Gaea, Earth), Tartaros (the Pit Below) and Eros (Procreation).

- Vap0rWar3To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings